Reform’s bruising week and why postal voting matters for party strategy

Good morning. Just six days until the last day of voting. I say “until the last day” because the UK has been voting for around three weeks — that’s when postal vote ballots started to come through letterboxes.

And as I wrote a fortnight ago, the launch of the parties’ manifestos has started to become a big part of the early phase of the election campaign because it makes a good set piece event for voters right as postal ballots are arriving.

More than one in five votes in 2019 were cast by post, though the chances of someone opting for a postal vote vary according to demographics. (A handy and informative research paper on that here.)

As you’d expect, voters who are older or have physical disabilities are more likely to vote in this way — the UK’s ageing society is one reason why postal voting has consistently increased over time.

It is older voters, too, who are the central focus of the Conservative campaign, which is focused on winning back former Tory voters who say they will vote Reform or not vote at all.

Please Mr Postman

Nigel Farage’s Reform party is experiencing the worst headlines in the party’s brief existence.

A canvasser working for Farage’s campaign in Clacton told voters that migrants should be used for army “target practice” and called Rishi Sunak a racial slur, while being filmed by an undercover Channel 4 reporter. The Guardian reveals Reform has had to disavow its parliamentary candidate in Basingstoke after it emerged he was a former member of the BNP.

ITV discovered that four Reform candidates were members of a public Facebook group which featured, among other posts, one that states there should be “no race mixing” and that “the only thing black a white woman should have is black leather”.

Farage himself has come under fire after saying in an interview with the BBC’s Nick Robinson. that the west “provoked” the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The last has prompted Rishi Sunak to abandon his “Reform is right — don’t vote for them!” strategy in favour of directly criticising Farage, using an interview with the Telegraph’s Ben Riley Smith to accuse the Reform leader of “appeasement”.

All of these stories hurt Reform and, given that Reform largely takes votes from the Tory party, probably does help the Conservatives at this election. But because Farage’s party is largely targeting older voters, who are much more likely to have voted by post, the past few weeks of stories about Reform will have less of an impact than if they were about a party that appeals to younger voters.

That’s one reason why Sunak’s decision to focus his campaign so squarely on winning back Reform voters is risky. In these final days, it means pitching to voters who are more likely to have voted by post already, rather than to voters still up for grabs. One aspect of Sunak’s poorly-run campaign is that he started it fighting for voters who the elections in May suggested were out of reach, and is ending it talking to voters who history suggests are likely to have voted already.

But it’s also one reason why Labour is right to remain anxious about suggestions that this election is already finished. Starmer’s party is much more vulnerable to a late shift in the priorities of voters — from kicking out the Conservatives to limiting the scale of a Labour majority, say — than Reform.

While Labour politicians are not being truthful when saying things like “no one has voted yet”, “the only poll that matters is polling day”, polling day itself is much more important for Labour than the weeks of postal voting are.

Now try this

I saw Bad Boys: Ride or Die last night, an engagingly well-constructed and pleasingly stupid action movie. Martin Lawrence in particular is a delight.

However you spend it, have a wonderful weekend!

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Below is the Financial Times’ live-updating UK poll-of-polls, which combines voting intention surveys published by major British pollsters. Visit the FT poll-tracker page to discover our methodology and explore polling data by demographic including age, gender, region and more.